Consumers have many options for consuming media content. In addition to traditional, non-interactive avenues such traditional television, radio, or projection screens in movie theatres, new electronic devices provide additional avenues for consuming media content, such as streaming content over the Internet via computers, smart phones, or tablets. Some of these additional avenues allow users to interact with the distributors of media content. This increased interaction allows distributors or producers of media content to provide more personalized services to the consumers of the media content.
The increased number of media options available to consumers has resulted in increased competition among of media content providers to attract consumers. In order to compete for available consumers, providers of media content must provide content that is interesting. In order to ensure that media content is interesting, content providers need to be able to measure their consumer's level of interest. Providers of media content can then use the measured level of interest to schedule current content and to produce future content that will of interest to consumers.
Collected user interest information can also be used to personalize provided media content to specific users. For example, a music streaming service can use interest information for a specific user to select the next song to be presented to that user. One option available to producers or distributors of media content for providing personalized services is through a recommendation engine. Such engines select new media content to recommend to the user based on information known about a user. Increasing the amount of information that a recommendation engine has concerning a specific user increases the accuracy of recommendation engine to correctly recommend media content that the user will find interesting. As a result, gathering information concerning what media content a user finds interesting and what media content a user does not find interesting is important to providing a good user experience.